For 20 years Sweden hashad a decentralized governing system, meaning that the national state decides about laws and regulations and where local “headmen” are responsible for the realization of the goals. To begin with local headmen were mostly the 290 municipalities. Over time there are however a growing number of independent schools interacting with the municipalities. Today the independent schools are integrated in the public sphere. They are public funded, follow the same laws and regulations and are inspected in the same way as the municipality schools.

With this mixture of public and private actors the Swedish case is not unique. Hentschke and Brewer (2010) describe that instead of a dual categorization in either public or private education (where the government pays for and provides services or not) there is a merging third category: a mixture of the two. Private actors provide education which is paid by the government (in the form of independent schools, charter schools, contract schools, foundation schools and so forth). This paper adds the Swedish case to that larger building project. The aim is to move from the general descriptions of the national system, to study what consequences this new mixture of headmen have for local school leaders. The main question is if there are any differences between principals working within different local contexts regarding how they relate to their local boards and superintendents.

The starting point for the study is the Swedish curriculum theory perspective specially developed to study how political decisions frame the works of schools (Forsberg, 2007). The perspective was initially developed during the preparing of a compulsory school system in the 1960´s, when the question in focus was if all children could attend the same kind of schools, and be taught in heterogeneous student groups. The research focus was on pedagogical effects coming out of this decisions (Dahllöf; 1972, Lundgren, U.P.; 1972) By then it was the classroom processes that was studied, but over the years it has broadened with a strong interest in governing processes (Lindensjö, B & Lundgren, U.P.; 1986; 2000).

What is central in this perspective is that focus is on text-production and consumption over time, and that these two activities occur within two different, but interlinked, contexts (to be compared with for example Bernstein, 1990, and Fairclough, 2003). In accordance to the governing system the local actors are supposed to interpret the national goals and transform them to local school activities. The need for interpretation as well as the fact that local actors work in different contexts makes this a complicated process. The perspective gives analytical tools for analyzing local curriculum work – that is: The work to transform the texts into actions. It needs however to be developed further. Some results will be presented in the final paper.

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